Am Ufer der zweiten Welt: Jean Pauls "Poetische Landschaftsmalerei" (review)

Eckart Goebel, Am Ufer der zweiten Welt. Jean Pauls "Poetische Landschaftsmalerei" Tübingen: Stauffenberg Verlag, 1999. 164 pages.

As a study of landscapes and perspectives, views and prospects (Aussichten) in the work of Jean Paul, Eckart Goebel's Am Ufer der zweiten Welt is perhaps best read in a Jean Paul fashion: through an inverted lens. The two concluding appendices, when read first, underscore the book's main methodological and theoretical moments, putting the work as a whole into perspective.

The last appendix (on Walter Benjamin's review of Max Kommerell's 1933 monograph Jean Paul) situates Goebel's project. By evoking Kommerell's methodology of immanent literary analysis, Goebel lays bare what characterizes his method as well as what has fallen in disrepute of late in Jean Paul scholarship: the need for close readings of Jean Paul's literary writings. Like Kommerell and a handful of others (most notably Wölfel and Böschenstein), Goebel does not reduce Jean Paul's literary work to questions of influence or to Jean Paul's own theoretical writings. Yet in the process of tracing the steps of Benjamin's subtle critique of Kommerell, Goebel also highlights a central theoretical premise that distances him from Kommerell's often conservative politics. Goebel emphasizes that, for Benjamin, Jean Paul called forth his Zeitgeist precisely by refusing to fulfill the demand that Classicism placed on bourgeois society: "Versöhnung mit dem Feudalismus durch ästhetische Erziehung im Kult des schönen Scheins" (156). Goebel's study can be read as a sustained delineation of how Jean Paul's use of Aussichten undermines the possibility of such reconciliation through "beautiful appearance."

The first appendix (on the notions of "reflection" and "feeling" around 1800) establishes the philosophical foundation for Goebel's exploration of Jean Paul: his critique of Fichte. For Jean Paul, Fichte's "idealistischer Idealismus" permits "gar kein[en] Weg mehr herein in die Endlichkeit und Existenz" (141). It is precisely the view and prospect of existence and finitude that Am Ufer der zweiten Welt addresses. As Goebel repeatedly underscores, Jean Paul's desire for a view of the infinite ("the second world") is never to be bought at the price of the finite ("the first world"), thereby distancing him from notions of infinite reflexivity, just as his emphasis on the corporeality of humor differentiates him from Romantic irony. For Goebel, Jean Paul possesses a "Bewußtsein der Endlichkeit" (147) like no other in his age. The central thesis of Goebel's work can be summed up in a statement that is at once theoretical and political: every attempt by Jean Paul to view the infinite ultimately leads back to "einer vertiefenden Aneignung der Wirklichkeit selbst" (40).

Am Ufer der zweiten Welt takes as its proper object of study Jean Paul's famous literary descriptions of landscapes. Yet as Goebel points out in his introduction and first chapter, Jean Paul never adheres to a mere mimetic relation to the outside world; a landscape is always more--and less--than itself: "'Landschaft' ist kein 'Objekt'. Sie ist vielmehr nur im deutenden Blick eines bestimmten Subjekts 'da'. . . . Sie steht als Membran genau zwischen Subjekt und Objekt, zwischen Mensch und Natur" (28). There is, then, no 'object' per se of Goebel's book; never there as such, landscape is an in-between realm that puts both the world and subject in perspective. The strongest moments of Goebel's book occur when his gaze wanders towards particular manifestations of subjectivity, such as Emanuel in Hesperus and Karl in Titan, both of which constitute exemplary readings within Jean Paul scholarship. The fact that Am Ufer der zweiten Welt goes beyond what the title promises belongs to its strengths, not its weaknesses.

The four central chapters consist in a series of close readings: first, of the short, but often overlooked theoretical piece "Über die natürliche Magie der Einbildungskraft," then of three novels: Hesperus, Titan, and Komet. The interpretations of the novels are simultaneously...